PurpleSkyz

About five years ago, things that seemed like miracles — things my mind couldn’t explain — started happening around me. Patients were having “spontaneous” remissions. Synchronicities were unfolding around me as if I had been swept up in some current of magic. Spiritual superpowers were awakening within me, bringing with them gifts and powers I didn’t know I had access to.

At first I was fascinated — in awe — and I played with these spiritual superpowers, which the yogis call “siddhis”. My entire view of reality was shattered. Things that should have been impossible were happening with regularity. At first, they were happening in waves of what I called “quickenings.” These quickenings lasted about two weeks and then a few months would pass before another quickening happened. Then, after a very mystical experience in January 2014, the mystical events became my new normal. I could no longer deny that reality was not as it seemed to my scientific, rational, materialist mind.

When I told Byron Katie about some of the events that were happening, she said, “Lissa, they’ve always been happening. Only now you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.”

Spiritual Superpowers? Say What?

For a while, I became quite enamored with these siddhis. My entire world view had just been smashed! I suppose it was natural to get a bit excited. But I also got scared. I didn’t trust myself. I wasn’t sure I had the wisdom or maturity to know how to practice these siddhis with strong spiritual ethics. How could I be sure that I wasn’t using these spiritual powers for personal gain or to manipulate others? How could I discern whether my ego was grabbing hold of these siddhis to puff itself up or get what it wanted?

I magnetized other people with siddhis, and they all had different ideas about what to do with these magical gifts. Some wanted to use our siddhis to make it rain in California in the midst of the worst drought ever. Some wanted to employ their siddhis to improve their golf game, or use metaphysical marketing to sell a product.

I was hesitant.

So I pulled back. I quit playing, and I started working with a spiritual counselor trained in transpersonal psychology. Many Buddhist traditions and yogic paths teach that we should avoid the siddhis altogether, that they are a natural part of the spiritual path but that they will distract you into a sort of spiritual cul de sac. Was I supposed to go that route and just ignore the powers I had accessed?

My spiritual counselor, as someone with access to many siddhis himself, has a middle view on the siddhis. He believes that it’s appropriate to use them to practice what he calls “white magic” or “Bodhisattva magic.” Many use their siddhis for black magic — sorcery — or for what he calls “grey magic,” which is well-intentioned but in service to the ego. White magic can be used to do God’s work in the world, he believes. It can also be practiced to help wake up other people who are still stuck in a materialist, rational world view that doesn’t make room for miracles as the new normal.

I have been working with him for two years in order to trust myself enough to know when it’s appropriate to practice these siddhis and when it’s not.

The Anatomy of a Calling

My new book The Anatomy of a Calling tells the story of many of these “quickenings” that were happening a few years ago. (Watch the book trailer here). The book is filled with “magic stories,” so it feels like I’m coming out of the spiritual closet, and I’m a bit nervous about making all of this public. Yet I felt called to share my story publicly, because I now realize that most of the magic was not just The Universe showing off. It was all quite purposeful, guiding me oh-so-directly towards my calling, so I can fulfill what my soul is here on Earth to do. I genuinely believe you too will be guided in the same way, once you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

I think it’s important to share magic stories. Almost everyone I meet has at least one story of something that they can’t explain, a mystery story that feels like a miracle or at least something that violates conventional scientific understanding. Yet most people keep these stories a secret for fear that others will think they’ve lost their marbles. When I started telling my magic stories on stages in front of 3,000 people, I realized that people had a choice. They could decide I was crazy — or lying — or telling the truth. And if I was telling the truth, then perhaps “reality” is different than they taught me in medical school.

So, let’s tell our stories, merge with synchronicity and make ourselves vessels for one of God’s holy ideas in the world. Let’s practice white magic, in sacred service to what wants to be born on our planet this year, offering ourselves up to the Divine to allow ourselves to be conduits for miracles, not as a way to show off or get what our egos want, but to commit deeply to our callings and let magic help us bring into being one of God’s holy ideas.

Whether it’s healing health care or saving the rainforest or stopping sexual trafficking of women and children, this year, it’s time for sacred activism. Many people are sensing that the troops are being rallied. Many of us have been doing deep inner work for many years in order to cleanse and purify us so that we can be aligned with white magic without it turning into sorcery or grey magic. Now is the time to come together with clear intentions and a pure heart, tuned to the frequency of miracles.

A White Magic Story

I’ll save my own magic stories for another time (or you can read them in my book!)… but let me give you an example of another person’s magic story.

One key feature of a white magic story is that magic is often used to help someone in need. In UC-Berkeley psychology professor Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s book Extraordinary Knowing, she tells the story of one of her clients, a neurosurgeon at her university who suffered from severe migraines. When she asked him when his migraines started, he said they began when he stopped teaching medical students and residents. Apparently, he loved teaching, but he felt he had to stop. Why did he stop teaching, she wanted to know? He hesitated. He didn’t want to tell her. But finally she coaxed it out of him.

The students and residents all wanted to know why nobody ever died in his operating room. How could he perform such risky brain surgeries without a high death rate? He didn’t want to answer their question because he thought they would laugh him out of the hospital. Turns out that as soon as he has the thought that a patient needs surgery, he will sit at the bedside with the patient for as long as it takes to see a white light appear over the patient’s head. When it does, he knows it’s safe to operate. If the white light doesn’t appear, he won’t do surgery. He almost never lost a patient.

Maybe the Universe can use us to do benevolent things in the world, if only we’re attuned to the frequency of miracles and willing to let something mysterious use us as Divine helpers in a world in need of more kindness, more love, more magic.

Do We Really Create Our Own Reality?

There’s a school of thought in spiritual circles that ascribes to the idea that everything that happens in our lives — the blissful things, the growth edge things, the horrid things — all happens with purpose. This spiritual teaching suggests that everything reflected in our lives is the result of our conscious or unconscious desires, and that when things aren’t going our way, it’s because the blueprint of the subconscious actually desires the very thing we think we don’t want.

In other words, we may believe that we want to meet the love of our life, or we may hope to have the cancer cured, but if someone were to muscle test us or read the subconscious mind intuitively, we would discover that at the level of the subconscious, we’re actually terrified of falling in love because of a past heartbreak, or the cancer is meeting some core need for rest, connection, or freedom from a toxic job, for example.

“Wait!” you say. “But I really DO want to find The One!” Or “Hang on a minute! I swear I want to be cured of my cancer.” Or “Watch it now. Are you suggesting that my business is failing because I want it to fail?”

Yes, and no. Those who promote this viewpoint are not suggesting that you CONSCIOUSLY want a crappy love life or cancer or failure in your business. They’re saying you subconsciously want it, and because your subconscious is in charge 95% of the time, this subconscious blueprint will sabotage the very thing your conscious mind wants to create. They say that everything in your life, you create. The good, the bad, the ugly — it’s all up to you.

Yeah! We Are Not Victims!

I find myself simultaneously attracted to and challenged with this viewpoint. The good news is that if this is true, and everything in our reality is the direct out-picturing of our subconscious blueprint, then we are not victims! We are empowered! If we are sick, or broke, or heartbroken, or grieving, or pained with unmet longing for something we don’t yet have, then we should be able to simply change the blueprint by reprogramming the conscious and subconscious mind, something we are increasingly able to do through energy psychology techniques.

I’ve witnessed and personally experienced seemingly miraculous outcomes from those who employ these techniques towards cancer or money issues or the desire for a dream to come true. So that seems kind of awesome. Heal the subconscious blueprint, and voila! Your 3D reality shifts almost instantaneously. You meet the love of your life. The cancer disappears. Your business takes off like a rocket ship to superstardom.

But Hang on a Second…

If this is the case, we should always be able to control outcomes in our lives and get what we want. The message is “You can have the perfect life! Whatever you desire, you can have—as long as you do more. Try harder. If you’re not getting everything you want, it’s all your fault—and you can change it.”

But then this sounds like yet another grasping strategy for how to get what the ego wants, a spiritual spin on how to control the Universe. This viewpoint also strikes me as cruel. If a mother loses her child, does this mean she subconsciously wants to lose her baby? Or that her baby subconsciously has a death wish? If a woman has stage 4 cancer but is fighting for her life with every possible treatment, does that mean that, at least subconsciously, she has lost the will to live? Does that mean that Syrian refugees subconsciously wish to be tortured and forced to flee their homes, running for their lives into a world that doesn’t want to welcome them and keep them safe? Does that mean that the poverty-stricken are subconsciously stuck in scarcity thinking? Such a viewpoint doesn’t feel benevolent or loving to me, not one bit. And how can we claim to be spiritual if we’re not deeply rooted in compassion, able to be with someone’s suffering as a source of comfort?

What If WE JUST DON’T KNOW?

I certainly can’t claim to know how to explain the cause and effect of 3D reality. What if we’re humble enough to acknowledge that the way the Universe operates is one big phat mystery? What if we’re all here for some unspecified purpose, and our souls are here to learn God knows what, and the Universe is conspiring to shower us with blessings—but those blessings may not be wrapped up in nice neat little packages? What if our wishes and desires are duly noted, but in some unseen realm, our souls are in cahoots with a wise, loving Universal Intelligence that participates in orchestrating our reality so that we can learn exactly what we’re here to learn so we can grow closer to whatever you might call God, so we can become more benevolent, more compassionate, more gentle, more humble, more unconditionally loving?

What if the Rolling Stones are right? Maybe we can’t always get what we want, but somehow, we get what we need?

I don’t know how these things work. I played around with these ideas in my upcoming book The Anatomy of a Calling: A Doctor’s Journey from the Head to the Heart and a Prescription for Finding Your Life’s Purpose, which you can preorder here. But I ask more questions these days than I dare to answer.

All I can conclude is that when it comes to spiritual teachings like this, we need to hold our viewpoints lightly. Be curious. Wonder. Be willing to participate in the co-creation of reality. Stay humble. Remain open for awe. If things go the way you wish, stumble into gratitude wholeheartedly. And if not, be exquisitely tender with your heart. Find the gifts in the challenges without blaming yourself or wallowing in a victim story, but also be kind and acknowledge that it is hard to be human, and we’re all doing the best we can.

If nothing else, practice compassion for all beings. Including yourself. BE love. Close your eyes right now and feel it. You are loved. Everything in the universe is conspiring to support you. Everything is going to be okay. . .

Lissa blogs at LissaRankin.com and also created two online communities – HealHealthCareNow.com and OwningPink.com. She is also the author of two other books, a speaker, a professional artist, an amateur ski bum, and an avid hiker. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and daughter.

We are all, every single one of us, heroes. We are all on what Joseph Campbell calls “a hero’s journey”; we are all on a mission to step into our true nature and fulfill the assignment our souls were sent to Earth to fulfill. Navigating the hero’s journey, Lissa Rankin MD argues, is one of the cornerstones of living a meaningful, authentic, healthy life.

In The Anatomy of a Calling, Lissa describes her entire spiritual journey for the first time — beginning with what she calls her “perfect storm” of events — and recounts the many transformative experiences that led to a profound awakening of her soul. Through her father’s death, her daughter’s birth, career victories and failures, and an ongoing struggle to identify as both a doctor and a healer, Lissa discovers a powerful self-awareness.

As she shares her story, she encourages you to find out where you are on your own journey, offering inspiring guideposts and practices along the way. With compelling lessons on trusting intuition, surrendering to love, and learning to see adversity as an opportunity for soul growth, The Anatomy of a Calling invites you to make a powerful shift in consciousness and reach your highest destiny.

Lissa Rankin’s book “The Anatomy of a Calling” is available here on Amazon.